The Firebird’s scenario, an amalgam of several versions of folk tales about a magical bird, combined supernatural characters and beasts with the natural, the fantastical world with the human, and Stravinsky enhanced the contrast between the two by giving the two worlds different styles of music. This was a technique he had learnt from his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. Human characters such as the twelve princesses, or Prince Ivan Tsarévitch, were given folk-song-derived melodies based on the common Western musical scale. The fantastical creatures and characters, on the other hand, were allotted a much more exotic and complex musical palette, often based on the so-called ‘Octatonic’ scale. This Persian-inspired scale – which has nine notes rather than the eight that make up Western major and minor scales – had been a feature of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, especially when depicting the magical, malevolent or the mysterious. In Stravinsky, the appearances of the mythical Firebird itself combined octatonic flavours with frantic, wing-flapping, fluttering rhythms.
Even when Stravinsky borrowed from Russian ethnic folk music, which he did in several of his Diaghilev ballet scores, he did so in order to distort it through some mischievous prism. He was deeply impressed by field recordings of peasant folk music he had heard in the years before he began composing The Firebird. They had revealed to the educated, bourgeois Stravinsky a distant, ritualistic world and his instinct to repackage Russian folk melody for a Parisian audience, surrounding what they might deem its vulgarity with the dazzling colour at his disposal in a large modern orchestra, was brilliantly provocative. In a cruel irony, ballet commentators back in Russia were irked by Western reviews of the Stravinsky-Nijinsky ballets, which used adjectives such as ‘barbaric’, ‘primitive’, ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ in almost every paragraph. The St Petersburg ruling elite of the Russian Empire, which had been expanding its Asian dominions greedily for most of the nineteenth century, had been enjoying their own version of Orientalism – celebrated, for example, in Borodin’s symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia of 1880, his opera Prince Igor and in all Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas. Now, it seemed, Russia itself was being portrayed as a ‘primitive’ society, lodged in the Western mind as an archaic peasant culture. Given that Russia was at this point at the very vanguard of modernism it was a bitter pill to swallow, and understandably so.
In their own different ways, all the radicals in the post-Wagner meltdown – Mahler, Debussy, Strauss and Stravinsky – were dismantling the previous system of musical organisation, whereby ideas carefully unfolded, one developing into the next. The new approach, to the ears of many at the time, was bewildering and anarchic.
Even though The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring ballets all have narrative threads, Stravinsky played against this tendency in his scores for them. Instead, he assembled a montage, an aural jigsaw, something perhaps closer to what we nowadays expect from a film score, so ballet’s short, kaleidoscopic episodes and restless, physical slideshow proved an ideal workshop for his remodelling of musical structure. In our hurried, twenty-first-century way of life, we find the idea of musical collage – the mix, the remix, the iPod shuffle and the mash-up – familiar and unthreatening. But we shouldn’t forget how bafflingly unfamiliar an idea this was to the musical establishment of the early 1900s. When the Ballets Russes toured Stravinsky’s second ballet, Petrushka, to Vienna in 1913, the scandalised musicians refused to play it, describing it as ‘dirty music’.
Stravinsky’s ballet style brought together the legacy of his Russian training, especially that learnt from his revered mentor Rimsky-Korsakov, and his fascination for the new sound palette being pioneered by Debussy, who for a while became his friend. There is a seductive, hallucinogenic quality to much Debussy, though, in contrast to the forceful physicality and ritualistic hypnosis of Stravinsky. Stravinsky, like all Russians, was turned on by the rhythmic urgency of dance. It is often overlooked that Jeux, a ballet score Debussy wrote for Diaghilev, which premièred a fortnight before Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, was almost as harmonically disorientating as the latter, but it was the primal violence captured in the rhythm and orgiastic pounding of the Stravinsky that caused The Rite of Springs first performance to descend into a shouting match.
The audience disturbances that undoubtedly did occur during the ballet’s première in Paris in May 1913 have been the subject of much colourfully exaggerated language in classical music’s collective retelling of the event, habitually being referred to as a ‘riot’. Some caution needs to be exercised in repeating this version of the drama, since (a) we are referring to a small gathering of well-to-do people in evening dress, some loudly complaining, others applauding, not a mob of looting thugs: no one was hurt and no property was damaged; (b) a further week of performances passed in Paris without incident and a London run two months later was received politely; and (c) contemporary reviews focused on the outrage provoked by Nijinsky’s radical choreography, which pulled no punches in depicting the abduction and ritual killing of an adolescent girl, rather than on Stravinsky’s music. Stravinsky may have been keen, in his recounting of the fateful première years later, to talk up the effect of his (undeniably brilliant) part in the collaboration, especially as within a year Nijinsky’s groundbreaking contribution had been dropped, not to be reunited with the music on stage until the 1980s.
Whatever may have happened in that small theatre on the Champs Élysées, The Rite of Spring is the twentieth century’s most thrillingly explosive, iconic piece of orchestral music; it is still astonishing a hundred years later. It is a rebellion in sound. While Mahler had layered melody on melody, tangled together like a twisted knot, and Debussy had manipulated blocks of adjacent sound melting into each other, Stravinsky went one step further, superimposing simultaneous rhythms on top of each other.
Polyrhythm, as it has since been dubbed, had long existed in African tribal drumming, improvised on the spot by highly intuitive, skilful players, often in various states of trance. But polyrhythm conceived from scratch by a composer, written down on the page, imposed on the Western symphony orchestra, player by player, was an utterly novel concept. Stravinsky reported that the idea for a piece based on an ancient pagan dance of ritual human sacrifice came to him in a dream and that the scenario suggested such a deliberately layered sound. It was as if he wanted the past and the present to coexist in one dimension, the prehistoric ritual of his dancers and the modern cacophony of the industrial world, and the only way he could conceive it was to make parallel, competing rhythmic patterns fight for the same space. It’s complicated, but it’s magnificent.
The Rite of Spring was the zenith of musical modernism in the early twentieth century. But that music had already reached such a point by 1913 presented progressively minded composers of symphonic orchestral music with a dilemma: where to go from here? It was a question that had already begun to be answered, but neither Stravinsky nor Debussy, in 1913, would have guessed just how massive the forces of change were going to be. The signs were all there, though, and had been for a while.
The agent of change was, to begin with, a humble strip of waxed paper from the year 1860. Scratched on the paper is the voice of a woman singing the French folk song ‘Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot’. Made on 9 April 1860, it is the oldest surviving evidence of the technology of recording, pre-dating Thomas Edison declaiming ‘Mary had a little lamb’ on his tinfoil phonograph by seventeen years, and making the man who created it, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the true inventor of the new technology.
Scott de Martinville had patented his machine, the phonautograph, in 1857. It worked by making impressions on the paper, which had been blackened by an oil lamp, using a stylus that vibrated when someone sang or spoke into a large barrel-shaped horn. But Scott de Martinville had no way of playing the recording back: running a stylus back over the indentations in the paper would destroy them. The paper rolls with his recordings were stored with his patent instructions at the Academy of Sciences at the French Institute, silent as t
he grave, until 2008, when a group of American audio historians and engineers used digital scanning technology to convert the markings back into sound. The French folk singer of 1860, miraculously, sang again.
The phonautograph began a process that would totally transform music. Very soon, in 1877, Thomas Edison invented a machine that could play recordings back, and a new breed of musician-researcher popped up, travelling around remote rural areas recording and preserving the folk songs that doubtless bemused locals were persuaded to perform. It is thought that the oldest surviving field recordings are those made in 1889 among the Passamaquoddy Indians in Maine, by American anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes. From the 1890s onwards, Edison’s wax-cylinder recording devices were being used all over the world, capturing for ever the oral and musical culture of communities now long disappeared. Those made by Evgeniya Lineva, for example, at the turn of the twentieth century in outlying parts of the Russian Empire, were the ones thought to have impressed Stravinsky while he was researching for The Firebird.
Hot on the heels of these philanthropic, documentary-style recordings came those intended to part a paying public with their money. The speed with which the gramophone took off is astonishing, considering how expensive a piece of gear it was in the early days (the equivalent of $550 at the turn of the century): the first million-selling record was of Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, the tearful clown, singing ‘Vesti la giubba’ from Leoncavallo’s opera I Pagliacci, in 1907. That I Pagliacci was only fifteen years old when Caruso popularised it on record – young in relation to opera’s extensive back catalogue – is, with the benefit of hindsight, strangely significant. After all, the record market would be overwhelmingly driven in the years to come by music that was new and that appealed to the young. When radio broadcasts of recorded music began from 1920 onwards, public interest in having one’s own record collection accelerated; what had been a trickle turned into a flood.
The advent of recording made the huge wealth of music already written by 1900 increasingly available to millions of people across the world, vastly expanding their musical horizons and turning something hitherto costly and rare into an ordinary commodity. This was a very good thing. But it was also the start of a process whereby, in classical music, the old soon far outweighed the new. Old music, thanks to repetition and familiarity gained through broadcasting and recording, and because there was, unsurprisingly, much more of it, was more comforting and pleasing. It challenged its listener less, required less effort and, as a non-threatening background accompaniment to other activities, it became ubiquitous in a way it could never have been before. Perhaps most significantly, this great wave of ‘rediscovered’ older music was being offered to the public just as modern music was embarking upon a journey towards greater difficulty, confrontation and experimentation. By the mid-twentieth century, even live concerts reflected this imbalance: whereas audiences in the nineteenth century expected to hear mostly brand-new music, as they do by and large in the popular field today, twentieth-century audiences had grown fearful and reluctant to hear new music. They began to prefer old music over new; this was, in many ways, not such a good thing.
Certainly, for popular music, recording was an unqualified blessing. It empowered and spread forms of music that had developed without notation, making available to a mass audience folk and ethnic music that had up to then been confined to local communities. For these communities, music was not just an entertainment. It was a refuge. But the music they had nurtured and were now able to share with the wider world was to have a profound, revolutionising impact on the twentieth century’s musical story.
African-American slaves and their descendants, living in conditions of oppressive poverty, developed over time a form of religious song, the spiritual, an amalgam of archetypal African call-and-response song forms and revivalist hymns, particularly those penned by the eighteenth-century English nonconformist writer-preacher Isaac Watts. Spirituals were rich with Old Testament references to the slavery of the Israelites, visions of redemption and heavenly justice – and there have been repeated, anecdotal claims that their texts also included coded references to escape routes and safe houses for endangered slaves in the Deep South.
The existence of the spiritual was for a long time mostly unknown to the white population, a situation that changed in 1871 when a group of African-American students from Fisk University in Nashville, the children of slaves themselves, formed a choir called the Jubilee Singers. Their repertoire included arrangements of spirituals, interest in which subsequently spread rapidly. That same year, they embarked on a series of fund-raising tours, first of the eastern seaboard of the United States and subsequently in Europe, particularly Great Britain, where their first private performance on 6 May 1873 was warmly reviewed in The Times, the Telegraph, the News and the Standard, and followed a few days later by a performance of ‘Steal away to Jesus’ and ‘Go down, Moses’ for Queen Victoria. Days later the Jubilee Singers were performing for the Prince and Princess of Wales, and Mr and Mrs Gladstone at the Prime Minister’s Carlton House Terrace residence. Their journal of the first British tour reveals a touched and amazed response to these events and to the respect they were shown, and includes a letter from Gladstone himself:
I beg you to accept the assurances of the great pleasure which the Jubilee Singers gave on Monday to our illustrious guests, and to all who heard them. I should wish to offer a little present in books in acknowledgement of their kindness, and in connection with the purposes, as they have announced, of their visit to England. It has occurred to me that perhaps they might like to breakfast with us, my family and a very few friends, but I would not ask this unless it is thoroughly agreeable to them.
The Jubilee Singers stayed in London for three months and then travelled north, arriving in Hull – the birthplace of William Wilberforce – on the fortieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery, followed by Scarborough, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ayr, Aberdeen, Perth and other Scottish towns. At Greenock they performed two concerts in the town hall to two thousand people a night. After a year in which they visited most of the cities of the British Isles, the Jubilee Singers returned to Nashville having raised £10,000 (£670,000 today) for facilities at Fisk University
The mixed-race English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose triumphant oratorio setting of Longfellow’s Hiawatha we encountered in the last chapter, and whose champions in Britain included Sir Edward Elgar, caused a similar sensation during three trips to the USA between 1904 and 1910. For a black composer-conductor of such conspicuous achievement to be fêted internationally as he conducted his own compositions was still a very rare, and possibly unheard-of, phenomenon in the eyes of the white arts community. While there, Coleridge-Taylor met the former leader of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Frederick J. Loudin, and in 1905 he made piano arrangements of twenty-four of the spirituals that the Fisk Jubilee Singers had popularised so successfully, calling them Negro Melodies.
But Coleridge-Taylor had previous experience of adapting African-American folk tunes. One of them, ‘A Negro Love Song’, from a collection of 1898, is early notated evidence of the melodic style of what came to be known as the Blues. The clues here are the so-called ‘flattened’ degrees of the musical ladder, or scale, at the third and seventh positions. The flattening of these degrees – that is, the slight lowering in pitch – betrays the origin of Blues melodies in older, modal key-families. It may well be a coincidence, but the rules governing melody in English Tudor music – ‘Greensleeves’, say – operate in a remarkably similar fashion: if the tune’s direction of travel is upwards (getting higher), the seventh position sharpens (raises its pitch); if the direction of travel is downwards (getting lower), the seventh flattens. This too is a function of the older modal scales that were not confused by the ambiguities thrown up by harmony (that is, before there was Equal Temperament or a distinction between major and minor versions of any given key-family). The flattening of the third and seventh notches on the scale is consi
stent with centuries-old African melody modes, memories of which had clearly not been lost among the children and grandchildren of slaves. The Blues, as it developed slowly and in a piecemeal fashion among former slave communities in the final decades of the nineteenth century, clung resolutely to the flattened thirds and sevenths, and has done so to the present day, passing on the modal melody shapes to hip-hop. Indeed, after the 1930s the thirds and sevenths actually became known as ‘blue’ notes.
Modal melodies, revivalist spirituals, the call-and-response or ‘holler’ songs of African slaves: all of these went into the mixing pot of the early Blues. Early Blues singers moulded tunes with African inflexions in them on to chords borrowed from American hymns, parlour, folk and vaudeville songs. But there were other African ingredients, too, such as use of the Akonting, the plucked folk lute used for accompanying solo singers, and which, alongside the Arab-inspired Spanish guitar, is a parent instrument of the banjo.
The fact that there were European elements in the DNA of the Blues should not surprise us: it had been nearly a century since new slaves had arrived in America from Africa, and the music that Americans of all backgrounds heard and shared in the second half of the nineteenth century was already well blended. There has been considerable research into song forms of the poorest Americans of all ethnic groups, particularly in Peter Van Der Merwe’s seminal Origins of the Popular Style, which has revealed the extent of the influence of Anglo-Celtic folk music on song types in the growth of the Blues. Not only had the distinctive flattened thirds and sevenths been a feature of Anglo-Celtic folk music since long before the Tudors, but Anglo-Celtic song types, picked up from the slaves’ and emancipated slaves’ co-workers, vast numbers of whom were from the British Isles, are also known to have been influential. Among these song types are hundreds that lament the burden and misery of underclass life, as became the standard Blues format. The particular lyrical stanza shape of what became the ‘twelve-bar Blues’, for instance, has been traced to templates derived from the seventeenth-century folk songs ‘The Cruel Ship’s Carpenter’ and ‘Pretty Polly’, via a nineteenth-century work song called ‘Po’ Lazarus’ (also known as ‘Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?’). Likewise the iconic nineteenth-century American work song ‘The Ballad of John Henry, the Steel-Driving Man’, which itself became a Blues standard, and which commemorates the futile battle between a black railroad worker and a new machine designed to replace him, can be traced back as a pattern to the much earlier British ballad ‘The Birmingham Boys’.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 26
